FRIDAY 5th SEPTEMBER
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION: 2.00-3.00pm – MYRA McCULLOCH FOYER
__________________________________________________________________________________
WELCOME: 3.00-3.15pm – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Welcome to the conference by Alison Butler, the Head of the Department of Film, Theatre &
Television, University of Reading
Introduction to the conference by organisers John Gibbs & Lisa Purse
__________________________________________________________________________________
SCREENING: 3.15-4.40pm
Prinzessin (Birgit Grosskopf, 2006) 82 minutes – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Starring Irina Potapenko, Henriette Müller, Desirée Jaeger, and Amina Schichterich
A searing portrait of four disenfranchised young women living in the public housing slums of a
dismal West German suburb. Focusing on the camaraderie and tensions of this feisty group, the
film is a subtle exploration of alienation, aggression, and friendship. Spare, beautiful
cinematography, a witty script and committed performances produce a harrowing but fascinating
film that surprises and discomfits from its first moments.
__________________________________________________________________________________
COFFEE: 4.40-5.00pm – MYRA MCCULLOCH FOYER
__________________________________________________________________________________
KEYNOTE: 5.00-6.30pm – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Chaired by John Gibbs
Douglas Pye, Visiting Fellow in Film, University of Reading – At the border: the limits of knowledge
in No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007) and The Three Burials of Melquiades
Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005)
These films have a good deal in common, not least the presence of Tommy Lee Jones playing
veteran men of the West – iconically, a cowboy and a sheriff - in stories set in West Texas and
concerned with the porous border between the USA and Mexico. I want to focus on one aspect of
point of view – the access to knowledge about the films’ worlds – as it affects the Tommy Lee
Jones characters (very much the moral centre of each film) and our position as spectators. In
different ways the films significantly limit the characters’ knowledge and understanding while
refusing the spectator broader perspectives - with parallel effects on the values and ways of
seeing tacitly endorsed.
Biography: Douglas Pye is recently retired but he remains closely involved with Department of
Film, Theatre & Television, of which he was Head for many years. A member of the Movie editorial
board from 1976, he has written a range of important essays on film and film analysis, including
‘Seeing by Glimpses: Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia’ (1988), ‘Film Noir and Suppressive
Narrative: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’ (1992), ‘In and Around The Paradine Case: Control,
Confession and the Claims of Marriage’ (2004), and ‘Movies and Point of View’ (2000). His books
include: The Movie Book of the Western (1996, co-edited with Ian Cameron), Style and Meaning:
1
Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (2005, co-edited with John Gibbs). He is series co-editor
(with John Gibbs) of Close-Up, an annual series devoted to the close analysis of film and
television, in which his own study ‘Movies and Tone’ was published in 2007. He was co-organiser
of the Style & Meaning conference which took place at Reading in the year 2000.
__________________________________________________________________________________
DINNER: 6.30-8.30pm – BULMERSHE DINING HALL
__________________________________________________________________________________
SCREENINGS: 8.30-10.30pm – VARIOUS ROOMS
__________________________________________________________________________________
BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1981) 125 mins
Starring Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa and Margaret Blye
The story of a Californian woman who is repeatedly and brutally assaulted by an unseen presence.
Terrified of what's happening to her, she initially turns to therapy for treatment. Yet as the attacks
become more extreme and her trust in the doctors falters, she seeks help from parapsychologists.
__________________________________________________________________________________
B147
Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007) 116 mins
Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen,
Jamie Campbell Bower and Laura Michelle Kelly
The film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's award-winning 1979 stage
musical. It re-tells the Victorian melodramatic tale of Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp), a fictitious
English barber who, driven insane by the loss of his wife and daughter, murders his customers
with a cut-throat razor, and with the help of his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter),
turns their remains into meat pies.
The film won a number of awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy,
and the Academy Award for Best Art Direction.
__________________________________________________________________________________
BG78
The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) 151 mins
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Vera
Farmiga, Ray Winstone and Alec Baldwin.
Scorsese’s remake of Hong Kong Thriller Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2002) takes
place in Boston, Massachusetts, where notorious Irish Mob boss Francis "Frank" Costello (Jack
Nicholson) plants his protégé Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) as an informant within the
Massachusetts State Police. Simultaneously, the police assign undercover cop William Costigan
Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) to infiltrate Costello's crew.
The film won four Academy Awards in 2007, including the Best Picture, and Best Director.
__________________________________________________________________________________
2
SATURDAY 6TH SEPTEMBER
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION: 8.30-9.00am – MYRA McCULLOCH FOYER
_______________________________________________________________________________
PANEL SESSION A: 9.00 – 10.30am – VARIOUS ROOMS
_______________________________________________________________________________
IMPACT OF DIGITAL PRACTICES - BOB KAYLEY
Chaired by Iris Luppa
Sheena Scott - Hidden images, hidden histories: the consequences of the digital on the
cinema through an analysis of Michael Haneke’s Caché
Abstract: This paper is a close analysis of Michael Haneke’s Caché and will explore how
contemporary cinema’s filmic space and form have changed. Generally in films, the colour or
definition of the images change to delimit different temporalities or places within the
narrative, for example the film will turn black and white to denote that the narrative is
jumping into the past. Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge de l’amour, for example does the exact
opposite, the first part, the present time, was shot in black and white with a 16mm camera,
whereas the second part, showing the past, was shot in colour with a DV camera. Caché,
however, does no such thing. The shots from the anonymous tapes and those that show the
past memory/dreams of the protagonist, George, look the same as the shots of the film itself.
They were all filmed with a High Definition digital camera. Thus confusing the cinematic image
with television, surveillance video and digital home camcorders. I will therefore first discuss
how cinema has changed due to the emergence of digital cameras and video, and then
secondly how this might have affected the way the spectator watches a film.
Biography: I am currently doing a PhD at University College London writing a thesis on the
relation of the sense of touch with the cinema, focusing on post-war French cinema. I took a
Masters in Film Studies at UCL, which I completed with Distinction. I graduated with first-class
honours in a BA in French.
Jenna Ng - Here’s looking at you: the point (of view) of handheld aesthetics in The Blair Witch
Project and Cloverfield
Abstract: This paper critically interprets the point of view in the aesthetics of the handheld
camera, whereby the entire film consists of “footage” shot by its characters in the style of a
home video. This motion sickness-inducing aesthetic choice—what Roger Ebert terms
“Queasy-Cam”—has been effectively used in horror thrillers such as The Blair Witch Project
(1999) and, more recently, Cloverfield (2007). The incessant filming which facilitates the
handheld aesthetic is only made possible by the technologies of an omni-present camera—
lightweight, cheap and typically digital. Through close analyses of Witch and Cloverfield, I
argue that the POV of this (omni)-camera emphatically amplifies the effect of the handheld
style, primarily in presenting all the horror and havoc of its diegetic world as a superordinated
form of suture—not via editing but, rather, by pulling over a Strange Days-esque SQUID.1 Like
a Vertovian nightmare, our vision is circumscribed by the camera’s lens which is utterly
machinic, robotic and dispassionate. In its unforgiving totality and impassiveness, I ultimately
argue that the camera itself becomes an object of horror: here’s looking at you, and all the
witches in the trees, and all the carnage around you, and there is absolutely nothing you can
do.
______________________________
In Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Strange Days, SQUID stands for “superconducting quantum interference device”,
a virtual reality machine which plugs directly into the brain so that someone’s past experience can be viewed,
sensed and played back to a client as if he/she was experiencing it so directly through the mind and body of
that person.
1
3
Biography: Jenna Ng is a final-year doctoral candidate in Film Studies at University College
London (UCL), where she is currently writing a thesis on time and the image. She has
previously published in online journals and edited collections on memory, cinephilia, digital
technologies and cinema and the city as well as various film reviews.
Michael Pigott - The analogue-digital feedback loop: video game aesthetics in Children of Men.
Abstract: This paper will argue that Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006) is clearly influenced by
the visual style and strategies of involvement discernible in video games with first-person
viewpoints. This will be demonstrated by identifying a series of distinct points of similarity
between the film and the recent WWII set first-person-shooter Call of Duty (Infinity
Ward/Activision, 2003). The adoption of these stylistic modalities is made possible by
innovations in digital technology and a growing awareness of the conventions, pleasures and
possibilities of video gaming.
Through an analysis of some of the most spectacular sequences in Children of Men I
will examine the ways in which the influence of video games manifests itself within the formal
and structural fabric of the film, and try to determine exactly what it is these effects are doing
to the relationship between the viewer, the camera, and the world of the film. From here, I will
argue that these characteristics achieve much more than simply injecting some of the thrill
and immediacy of video games into feature film – they also work within and contribute to the
thematic and narrative scheme of the film as a whole.
Biography: Michael Pigott is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at the University
of Warwick (UK). His area of specialization is film aesthetics, focusing on the ontological and
stylistic relationship between time and film. Michael has work forthcoming on the
representation of memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and on the treatment of
time in Ozu Yasujiro’s Late Spring.
_______________________________________________________________________________
FRAGMENTED TEXTS – STUDIO 2
Chaired by Kathrina Glitre
James Walters - Fragmentation and coherence in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill vol. 1 & 2
Abstract: Recently described as “largely lessons in how to borrow styles gracefully” (Booker
2007: 93), Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films provide a sometimes frenetic collage of aesthetic
tones and strategies that might be seen to compromise notions of coherence, credibility and
unity in relation to the films’ fictional world. Taking such issues into account, this paper seeks
to determine the extent to which patterns and significant relationships are established and
pursued within the films, and how sequences combine to form a discernible reality in which
the characters exist. Within the confines of this debate, and through close analysis of key
moments from both films, I am interested in how the words, actions, attitudes and
sensibilities of particular characters relate meaningfully to the world they inhabit, reflecting its
tone and nature as well as its opportunities, restrictions, codes of conduct and social
hierarchies. In the course of this discussion, I propose that the fragmented style of the Kill Bill
films provides occasion for detailed consideration of its fictional world as a coherent reality
experienced by its characters, rather than restricting claims for significance only to matters of
pastiche, parody and self-conscious cultural borrowings.
References:
Booker, M. Keith (2007) Postmodern Hollywood: what’s new in film and why it makes us feel
so strange, Westport: Praeger.
4
Biography: James Walters is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of
Birmingham. He is the author of Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema (Intellect, 2008) and
is currently writing a second book, Fantasy Cinema (Berg, forthcoming). He has chapters
appearing in the collections Film and Television After DVD (Routledge, 2008) and Violating
Time: History, Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Lucy Fife - The death of performance? Questions of post-studio style and meaning in The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Abstract: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is now over thirty years old, nonetheless it still
offers a considerable and unmet critical challenge to any detailed approach. Its visual style
represents a significant formal rupture to continuity between classical and contemporary,
even more so than current horror texts. Through close analysis this paper will explore the
film’s stylistically intricate form, examining the means by which it complicates the way we
receive information and thus deliberately raises questions about interpretation.
As a method of exploring the extent of this challenge I will explore the potential of
performance analysis to open up ways of engaging with the post-studio horror film. The way
the performers’ bodies are used and placed within the space of the film suggests that there is
an attempt to alter engagement with the characters, yet in the case of such an excessive
fragmentation of a performer’s body, does severe lack of characterisation mean there is no
performance to discuss? I aim to examine whether the film’s apparent rejection of attention
to performance is genuine, and if this is the case does it mean that in the post-studio period,
performance can be so different, so unconcerned with character, as to become an impossible
consideration?
Biography: Lucy Fife is a third year PhD student in the Department of Film, Theatre &
Television at the University of Reading, researching performance in the post-studio horror film,
with particular focus on the materiality of performance and its relationship to elements of film
style. She received her Research MA in Film from the University of Reading and her BA in Film
and English Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury.
_______________________________________________________________________________
VISIBILITIES OF STYLE – BG78
Chaired by Mark Broughton
Jacob Leigh - Eric Rohmer’s Visible Camera
Abstract: Despite arguing, in 1965, that ‘a cinema where the camera is invisible can be a
modern cinema’, Rohmer has sometimes created moments where the camera’s work claims
our attention. This paper will focus on three examples of Rohmer’s ‘visible camera’. William
Rothman has noted that one similarity between Rohmer’s work and Hitchcock’s work is that
neither the Hitchcock thriller nor the Rohmer comedy can be defined without characterising
‘the role the figure of the author plays within its world’. Le Rayon vert and Conte d’hiver
manifest the controlling responsibility of the director through a form of internal doubling: both
refer to their germinating source material (Verne and Shakespeare). In doing so, both films
invite us to recognise the framework supporting their stories. Unlike these two examples,
Rohmer’s three ensemble comedies (Pauline à la plage, L’Ami de mon amie and Conte
d’automne) use the insistency of a camera movement to highlight the structure of the films’
narratives. The ‘visibility’ of the camera movements focuses our attention on the interlocking
trajectories of the multiple characters. Each of these moments features a movement by the
camera that highlights its independence from the characters and draws our attention to
Rohmer’s control.
Biography: Jacob Leigh BA, MA, PhD (Lecturer, Media Arts, Royal Holloway)
5
My publications include The Cinema of Ken Loach and Reading Rohmer, published in CloseUp 02. I am currently writing The Cinema of Eric Rohmer for Wallflower Press. I have also
published an article on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line in CineAction and an article on
Rohmer’s Conte d’automne in the FIPRESCI online journal Undercurrent. At Royal Holloway, I
teach courses on Film Aesthetics, Documentary, Hitchcock, Hollywood Star Performances,
Critical Theory and Textual Analysis.
Elif Akçali - Discontinuities in contemporary cinema: a new continuity and a new convention
Abstract: Discontinuity, fragmentation and absence are often keywords in descriptions of a
new style in contemporary narrative cinema of the past decade. Conventional techniques of
storytelling have been transformed: non-linearity in the editing of a film, use of shorter shots
and faster cuts or lack of continuity and causality in terms of time and space are common
practices. Style in many contemporary films is a part of the narrative; instead of disrupting our
engagement with the stories, it adds to their meaning and coherence. Discontinuities,
fragmentations and absences now form a new continuity; once viewed as unconventional and
as resisting the established forms of filmmaking, they have become conventional choices.
Referring to Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
and L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962), I will trace how absences, discontinuities and
fragmentations were once used in cinema. I will then contrast this usage with a discussion of
how their functions have reformed in time by using examples from contemporary cinema such
as Dogville and Manderlay (Lars von Trier, 2003 and 2005), Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).
Biography: Elif Akçalı is a second year PhD student at the Department of Media Arts at Royal
Holloway, University of London. Her research interests include film style and narrative in
contemporary cinema, digital filmmaking, film history and criticism.
Belén Vidal - The mannerist aesthetic: fragments and figures in the contemporary heritage
film
Abstract: In this paper I would like to explore the notion of a mannerist style concerned with
the period aesthetics in the heritage film. Whereas notions of ‘realism’ and ‘authenticity’ have
proved an uneasy fit to describe these contemporary reconstructions of the past, the term
mannerism can be used to refer to the increasing importance of the fragment and the figure
to evoke historical intertexts. Following Adrian Martin’s suggestion that mannerism defines
film-making practices in which ‘style performs out on its own trajectories, no longer working
unobtrusively at the behest of the fiction and its demands of meaningfulness’, I contend that
the pleasures of the heritage film, often reduced to pastiche and nostalgia by its critics, can
be situated in the play with repetition and variation of visual figures in the period mise-enscène.1 The simultaneous readability and self-consciousness that imbue figures such as ‘the
house’ or ‘the letter’ often arises as the stylistic raison d’être in period fictions and new
adaptations of classic texts. Thus, the consideration of a ‘mannerist mode’ in period
aesthetics allows for an interrogation of motifs as visual fragments obeying to their own
(intertextual) logic. By looking at one recurrent figure - ‘the house’ – this paper examines the
affective variations proposed by the heritage film in relation to the return of national
iconographies at a moment of weakening of the national, i.e. of dislocation of national
cinemas in the global circuits of production and reception.
____________________________________
Martin, Adrian (1992) ‘MISE EN SCENE IS DEAD, or the Expressive, the Excessive, the Technical and the
Stylish’, Continuum 5 (2): 87-140, p. 91.
1
Biography: Belén Vidal lectures in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of
Textures of the Image: Rewriting the American Novel in the Contemporary Film Adaptation
(Valencia University Press, 2002) and has published articles on gender theory and the
aesthetics of the period film in journals such as Screen and Journal of European Studies. She
6
is currently working on the monograph Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation
(forthcoming from Wallflower Press).
_______________________________________________________________________________
COFFEE: 10.30-11.00am – MYRA MCCULLOCH FOYER
_______________________________________________________________________________
PRACTITIONER Q & A: 11.00-12.30pm
Chaired by Alison Butler
Birgit Grosskopf – Q & A session
We are delighted to welcome Birgit Grosskopf to the conference to discuss her work.
Biography: Birgit is a German filmmaker who has garnered numerous awards for her debut
feature film Prinzessin (2006).
Prinzessin has won prizes including the German
Independence Award at the Oldenburg Film Festival (2006), the Saarland Minister President’s
Award at the Max Ophüls Film Festival (2006), and the Edinburgh Film Festival First Steps
Award for best German debut feature (2006). Birgit has also directed several short films
including Babies in Pockets (1999), The Pilot (2000), Live Boys (2001), and Tabula Rasa
(2003).
_______________________________________________________________________________
WORKSHOP SESSION A: 11.00-12.30pm - VARIOUS ROOMS
STUDIO 2
Douglas Pye – A workshop on No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007)
Chaired by John Gibbs
This workshop will develop some of the issues raised by the opening keynote address by
exploring the detailed realisation of No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007).
_______________________________________________________________________________
BG78
Mike Stevenson – 'I think cinematically when I'm writing songs and I stage them in my
head. And I realize that I stage them like a movie'. (Stephen Sondheim)
A workshop on Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007)
Chaired by Tom Brown
Abstract: Late 2007 saw the release of three genre films that seemed bound to be of interest
to serious film criticism. Both Paul Thomas Anderson’s There will Be Blood and the Coen
Brothers No Country for Old Men have already attracted that attention, and also been given
much public acclaim. This was rather less so for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Although the
praise for the first two films and the neglect of the other is intriguing in itself and is worthy of
speculation as to why it should be so, even more interesting is the extremely divided nature of
popular interest and support for Sweeney Todd. On the large number of websites and blogs
that discussed the film it was immediately clear that you were for or against Sweeney, you
7
execrated it or loved it – rarely was there a middle position (see appendix 1 & 2 below). These
opposing positions in ‘popular reception’ were hardly able to articulate clear argument as to
the reasons for animosity or adoration but, often, opinion swung around five issues: The
nature of the text as a Musical with its many inter-generic connections; the status of the
music itself and especially the singing, (‘they can’t sing’, ‘there are no good tunes’); a
considerable ambivalence to Sondheim’s position within popular culture (‘it’s opera’); the
relation of Sweeney to Tim Burton’s other work (‘this not what we expected from him’); and
finally the nature of Sweeney as a work in film rather than of the theatre, is this
transformation into film as film productive?
Of course further general issues on the film will emerge in the workshop, which will
begin with a request for some brief general statements from attendees. Subsequently the
opening of the film will be analysed in order to consider the kind of world it constructs. The
main body of the workshop will consider the Pretty Women sequence and conclude with the
ending of the film and any last comments from the workshop members.
Appendix 1: ‘Sweeney Todd Sucks’
This movie was horrible from start to finish. First off, it's a musical. That wouldn't be a problem if there were
some good songs sung by talented singers, but that's not the case. The songs all sound the same. And they
all suck. There's no melody and the lyrics are dull and boring. And oh yeah, the people singing them can't sing!
Sweeny Todd is a horrible movie that's disjointed at best. There's no rhyme or reason to anything, stuff
happens inexplicably, and the audience is left guessing as to what is what. I was shocked to find out that this
turd of a movie was nominated for various awards and I'm wagering that the people who enjoyed this film are
pretentious film-goers. Lame.
Appendix 2: ‘An absolutely splendid film musical’
To say that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is unique would be an understatement. …Being
a musical, the most important thing is the music, which is simply superb in this film. Every note hangs in the
air, keeping you in your seat, with every change in sound drawing you in deeper and deeper. The music
remains consistent throughout, maintaining uniformity so none of the songs seem out of place.… And as such,
the actors have done a fantastic job of moving the plot along. Depp is perfect for his role as Sweeney Todd,
utilising the eccentricity he had gained while starring as Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the
Caribbean Series. His singing is no less than perfect, striking every note with a tinging that that reverberates
through out your body. The same can be said about Helena Bonham Carter, her high voice matching perfectly
with Depp’s baritone voice. Their duet My Friends is one that must be heard and is probably my favourite
song in the whole movie…An absolutely splendid film musical, whose stars appear they have been singing all
their lives. Johnny Depp’s performance is phenomenal, and makes it clearly why he won the Golden Globe.
The songs are great which bring this classic tale to life, and the duets are simply the best and are the ones to
look
Biography: Mike Stevenson, a visiting fellow in Film and Television at the University of
Reading, works primarily on European Cinema with a particular concentration on Polish
Cinema and Polish Culture more generally. Linked to this is an interest in issues in Holocaust
representation.
His theoretical interests are on issues around the relations of text, context and ideology.
His research interests also include Buñuel and Brecht, both providing an interrelationship to
his interest in the relations of continuity and innovation in Stephen Sondheim's work in
Theatre and Film.
_______________________________________________________________________________
LUNCH – 12.30-1.30pm - BULMERSHE DINING HALL
_______________________________________________________________________________
8
PANEL SESSION B: 1.30 – 3.00pm – VARIOUS ROOMS
_______________________________________________________________________________
DIGITAL IMAGES: FORMAL STRATEGIES – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Chaired by Tom Hughes
Lisa Purse – Excess, otherness and alibis in 300: confronting the issue of representation in
contemporary digital effects cinema
Abstract:
The promotional discourses circulating around contemporary digital effects movies (such as
production diaries, ‘Making of’ DVD documentaries, and press articles) encourage a focussed
attention on the mechanics of digital image processes, but pointing conveniently away from
questions of meaning, or indeed ideology. This paper will argue that in the task of
interpretation, digital image elements and digital ‘effects’ should never be divorced from the
wider narrative, thematic and representational structures in which they sit. Moreover, the
deployment of digital imaging technologies on the screen is the result of a series of decisions
by the filmmakers and visual effects artists; framing the idea in this way should prompt
necessary consideration of the alternatives that were refused in constructing the image as it
appears in the final film. What decisions have been made about what can and cannot be
shown, about what is appropriate, about what seems most effective? Such questions reveal
the ideological impulses that often (unwittingly or intentionally) drive such decisions. Arguing
that the digital’s interventions into and reconstructions of the film image must be seen as
both aesthetically and ideologically motivated, the paper will use Zack Snyder’s film 300 as
an illustrative case in which digital elements interact with the profilmic to construct bodies
and space in particular ways, and with troubling consequences. Resisting cultural discourses
that explain such films away as ‘only entertainment’ the paper calls for a more focussed
attention to the politics of representation in the presence of the digital.
Biography:
Dr Lisa Purse is a Lecturer in Film in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the
University of Reading. Her research explores the relationships between aesthetics and the
politics of representation in post-studio mainstream and independent US cinema, looking
particularly at constructions of the body and physicality in relation to gender, ethnicity,
sexuality, nationality, and notions of power. She is currently writing on post-1990s US action
cinema and researching the articulation of physicality in film. She has published essays on
popular cinema’s interactions with digital media, and her forthcoming monograph Reading
the Digital explores the challenges that digital elements of the film frame pose for
interpretation.
Aylish Wood - ‘It takes a certain kind of artist’: digital evolutions and VFX practices
Abstract: This paper will argue that approaches of cinema studies to digital fx can benefit
from a consideration of the discourse that circulates within the vfx (visual fx) practitioner
communities through the many web-based practitioner interviews and DVD extra materials.
These materials provide a framework that both compliments and also extends the existing
critical tools utilised within cinema studies. Vfx practitioners take for granted that working
within a digital environment makes possible pixel-level manipulation. In their reflections on
films such as Transformers, Superman Returns, Sin City, and 300, it becomes apparent that
a filmmaker’s expressive strategy involves the manipulation of layers and groupings of textual
elements. A critical approach indebted to photorealism will only address the global
organization of an image, and while vfx practitioners also note this global organization, their
discourse is far more revealing of the extensive work behind the image, generating an
9
understanding of expressive practices embedded in the microstructure of the image. As the
critical approaches of cinema studies are reconfigured through practitioner discourse the
'wow' effect of fx becomes lost. Though some may feel sadness in letting go of awe, having
done so, cinema studies has a greater array of tools available. It is therefore more able to
articulate the capacity of digital effects to alter not only the expressive potential of imagery in
popular cinema, but to also consider how these in turn alter the representational strategies of
such films.
Biography: Aylish Wood’s recent work on digital fx have been published in Screen, New
Review of Film and Television, and Film Criticism. Her book Digital Encounters (Routledge
2007) is a study of digital media.
Costas Constandinides - Moments of perfect vision in post-Matrix blockbuster cinema
Abstract: Lev Manovich claims that “although we normally think that synthetic photographs
produced with computer graphics are inferior to real photographs, in fact, they are too perfect.
But beyond that we can also say that, paradoxically, they are also too real” (2001: 202). The
synthetic image is too real because according to Manovich it is freed from the limitations of
human vision or the camera lens, thus it is the vision “of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic
missile […] it is the vision of a digital grid” (Ibid.). Recent films such as 300 (Zack Snyder,
2006) essentially announce that the perfection of the synthetic image will not remain hidden
or as Manovich said bend down “before the film image” (Ibid.: 204). Post-Matrix cinema has
invented new filmmaking techniques to narcissistically communicate the perfection and detail
of the synthetic image. Post-Matrix cinema also remediates other media forms that allow it to
interplay with a conscious use of computer graphics and thus shape the new aesthetic of the
“moving graphic novel”. Blockbuster cinema then seems to be moving beyond representation
and reverses its course towards the refinement of realistic codes either cinematographic or
digital, to the ‘cinematographicization’ of the photographic and the photorealistic. Therefore,
this paper indents to examine in detail these moments of perfect vision in films such as 300,
which essentially exemplify this move beyond the problem of realism.
Source: Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media. Massachusetts: MIT, 2001.
Biography: Costas Constandinides is a Lecturer in the Communications Department at The
University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He teaches film studies and Television Studies. Undergraduate
studies at the University of Cyprus (B.A in English Studies, 2002) and Graduate studies at the
University of Reading, UK (MA Film and Theatre, 2003, PhD in Film/TV Adaptation, 2007). His
research interests are mainly Film/TV adaptation and Digital Cinema. He has taught in the
Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading and he is the cofounder of the Rooftop Theatre Group.
_______________________________________________________________________________
FICTIONAL WORLDS: CHALLENGES TO COHERENCE AND TONE - STUDIO 2
Chaired by Simone Knox
Tom Brown - Turning points? Irony and direct address in Magnolia (P.T. Anderson 1999)
Abstract: Drawing on work on irony and ‘smart cinema’ (Sconce 2006), my paper considers a
filmmaking device that often indicates an ironic approach to the filmed world: ‘direct address’.
My analysis is focused on the final shot, more precisely, the final moment of the final shot of
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, in which Claudia (Melora Walters) looks into the camera
and appears to acknowledge our ‘presence’ as film spectators. Eschewing vague notions of
the distancing (or ‘distanciation’) effect of direct address in the cinema, I deal first with this
moment’s specific place within the film as a whole. For example, this look at the camera
10
accompanies the romantic declarations of Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), whose words
compete on the soundtrack with Aimee Mann’s song, “Save Me.” Mann’s music is integral to
the film as a whole, and at one point earlier in Magnolia, the multiple protagonists are seen
mouthing or singing along to Mann’s song, “Wise Up”, in a way that problematises any
distinction between the diegetic and the non-diegetic. Such divisions are clearly also
questioned by the look at the camera.
Though my paper is focused primarily on the detail of the film itself, the particular role of
music within Magnolia’s film world requires one to consider broader contextual frameworks,
specifically the important place of direct address in the musical genre, something noted in the
work of Jane Feuer (1993: 35-42). The classic Hollywood musical employs this device without
irony, in the sense that it is, typically, a sincere consummation of the affective connection
between performer and audience. However, in Magnolia, I suggest, irony represents a
problem both to our engagement with the characters and to our understanding of the final
look at the camera. This look follows Jim’s words, “Do you see?” The final look at the camera
seems to answer, “Yes, I do”. However, the audience is forced to measure the apparent clarity
of this gesture against the myopia that has, up to this point, characterised interpersonal
relationships in the film. Does the look at the camera mark the ultimate transcendence of
these problems, or is it a final joke at the characters’ expense?
Biography: Tom Brown is lecturer in film in the department of Film, Theatre & Television at the
University of Reading. His paper for ‘Continuity and Innovation’ emerges from research on
‘direct address’, which is being prepared for publication in the annual film studies series
Close-Up (number 5, 2010). Tom’s wider research considers diverse issues in European and
Hollywood cinema (including an article on film spectacle in Screen 49:2) and he is the coeditor of Film and Television after DVD (NY: Routledge, 2008).
Tim Vermeulen - The 'suburb' film: some notes on a genre (?)
Abstract: With so many recent films overtly engaged with the suburban environment they are
set in, from Hal Hartley's bleak Trust (1991) to Sam Mendes' colourful American Beauty
(1998), some critics have, perceiving something of a genre, suggested, in a bit of a short
hand, a shared terminology: the 'suburb' film (Felperlin 1997, Muzzio & Halper 2002).
Surprisingly however, none of them has actually explored its generic validity, usefulness, or
specific traits. The 'suburb' film has remained, to paraphrase another critic, largely 'uncharted
territory (Jurca 2001)'. In this paper I intend to, first, linking it to the pomo debate and to
melodramas, small town movies and sitcoms from the 1950s, shortly explain why it is indeed
a valid and useful tool for appreciation and analysis; and, second, analyze one 'suburb' film,
Todd Solondz' Happiness (1998) on what I take to be its constitutive traits: an ambiguous
rendering of the main thematics, the suburb, the suburban way of life and the suburbanites,
by means of the use of a certain tone – 'objective' irony – and its repeated incongruence in
relation to respectively narrative or image, and the re-appropriation – or rather,
deconstruction – of mise en scène and spaces seemingly adapted from melodramas and
sitcoms (set in either suburbs or small towns) from the 1950s. In this way I hope to provide a
novel way of looking at a 'new' type of film.
Biography: Tim Vermeulen is an AHRC funded Ph.D. student in the Department of Film,
Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. His thesis is on the cultural geography of
white middle-class suburbia in recent American film and television. He has previously gained
MA degrees in Film with Television studies (Warwick), Media Studies (Rotterdam), and
Cultural Philosophy (Rotterdam).
Ibrahim Cansizoğlu - Dogma 95 Manifesto and the Ordinary Act of Filmmaking
Abstract: From the beginning of its conception Dogma 95 manifesto incited several debates
related with cinema and other realms of culture. The manifesto became a motivation for a
series of internationally acclaimed Danish films alongside it spurred many independent
11
filmmakers from all around of the world. The main focus of my analysis is the use of digital
hand held camera in Dogma films. I argue the production of moving images with digital hand
held cameras designed for non-industrial use signifies a shift in the mode of production in
cinema. Following Lefebvre's idea that every mode of production creates its own social space,
one may argue that Dogma movement proposed a new social space for filmmaking which is
more inclusive and democratic. Within this new social space the viewer’s own experiences of
recording moving images is a part and parcel of film spectatorship. Furthermore
performativity of the hand held camera forces us to reconsider the ontology of film frame. For
all these reasons the analysis of Dogma films can be used as a litmus paper to test Godard’s
predictions about the role of hand held camera in future of cinema.
Biography: Ibrahim Cansizoğlu received his bachelor degree in Economics from Koç University
in 2004. He completed his graduate education at Sabancı University Visual Arts and Visual
Communication Design Department in 2007. He held a number of assistantship positions at
these universities. His essays on several Turkish contemporary art exhibitions were published
in catalogues and bulletins. Since fall 2007 he has been teaching at İzmir University of
Economics as a full time faculty member. His academic interests are visual theory, film
theory, 20. Century art history and political economy of media.
_______________________________________________________________________________
FORM IN CONTEMPORARY REALISMS – BG78
Chaired by Alison Butler
Reina-Marie Loader - City of God: continuity or innovation? Visual chaos in the form of real
stories
Abstract: Fernando Meirelles’s film City of God has been hailed as ‘not simply a film’, but a
frightfully realistic depiction of the social injustice in and around Rio de Janeiro’s many
favelas (slums). In Brazilian terms it has therefore become ‘an important fact, a crucial event,
a borehole in the conscience of the country’ that has actively prompted social and political
changes.1 With this film, Brazil has been offered for the first time a visual document that
violently depicts the shortcomings of its own government as opposed to those of the former
colonising West. For many therefore, the film is a shift towards a new Brazilian Cinema
Novo … a technological innovation that marks the ‘Recovery of Brazilian Cinema’ in an
internal and contemporary context.2 City of God is also an important political tool. Brazil’s first
president from the Workers’ Party, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example used the film as part
of his political campaign during the 2002 elections, showing that the film’s mode of
docudramatic storytelling captures the real chaos within Brazilian society.
However, due to Meirelles’s stylistic choices, American and UK critics often see the film as a
continuation of the American gangster genre within an exotic setting thus describing it as ‘the
Brazilian Goodfallas’, ‘a kind of Boyz in the Brazilian hood’ and ‘Gangs of Rio de Janeiro’. 3
Such criticism, though, present many problems for those who see the film as part of the
revival or continuation of the progressive Brazilian cinematic tradition called Cinema Novo.
Through close analysis of Meirelles’s seemingly ‘chaotic’ stylistic choices, this paper will
investigate how City of God functions as a social commentary within a critical field that
regards the film as technologically innovative. At the same time the film’s function will be
considered as a continuation of a critical movement set against two established genres,
notably the gangster film and docudrama.
___________________________________________
1 Vieira,
Else R.P. (ed.), ‘City of God’ In Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action, Critical, Cultural and
Communications Press: UK, 2005, p. iii.
2 Gatti, André, ‘City of God: A Landmark in Brazilian Film Language’, in Vieira, Else R.P. (ed.), ‘City of God’ In
Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action, Critical, Cultural and Communications Press: UK, 2005, p.
44.
12
3 Shaw,
Miranda, ‘The Brazilian Goodfellas: City of God as Gangster Film?’, in Vieira, Else R.P. (ed.), ‘City of
God’ In Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action, Critical, Cultural and Communications Press: UK,
2005, p. 58.
Biography: Reina-Marie Loader is a first year PhD student in the Department of Film, Theatre
and Television at the University of Reading. The main focus of her research currently includes
the aesthetics of docudrama as well as its application through practice. She received her
Research MA in Film as well as her BA in Film and Theatre from the University of Reading.
John A. Riley - Neo-Bazinian realism in Artur Aristakisian’s Palms.
This paper proposes Palms (1993), a lyrical study of Moldova’s urban underclass, as an
example of a film that can both complicate and clarify the notion of realism for contemporary
film studies, at a time when postmodernism complicates the idea of the real, and digital
production threatens to retire photographic ontology.
Palms amalgamates documentary and fiction, and unusually displays decay, rather than
increasingly available fidelity, in the materiality of the film itself - Aristakisian shot on cheap
16mm and blew it up to 35mm for theatrical release. The film displays a tension between
material and method: the raw stuff of the film is a series of Bazinian long takes, but it is a film
that is very much assembled in the editing suite, from many hours of shot footage.
I use propositions derived from Bazin’s highly evocative work to explore whether these formal
factors are to be viewed as aesthetic or merely necessary ones for the film-maker, and ask
what kind of realism the film proposes through its tensions and meldings – Aristakisian’s
unflinching gaze, which breaks the world down into “facts”, as opposed to the willful
fabulation of the voice-over.
Biography: I am currently working on my PhD thesis, entitled “The Dialectics of Vision and
Dialogics of Nature in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky”, and have an MA in “Contemporary
Cinema Cultures” from Kings College, London. Other interests include Russian and Soviet film
and animation, and Bazinian, Eisensteinian and Deleuzian film theories.
Thomas Schick - A new approach to reality? Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing) in the
context of the “Berlin School”
Abstract: Since the beginning of the 1990s the directors Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec
and Thomas Arslan tried to break new ground within the German cinema by telling simple
stories from everyday life with very little dramatic emphasis. Other filmmakers like Christoph
Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg or Valeska Grisebach continued to follow that path and
searched for new cinematic means to depict contemporary everyday life. Film criticism
labelled this group of young German directors with the term “Berlin School” (“Berliner
Schule”). Although this term is broadly discussed within film criticism and the “Berlin School”
seems to be rather a loose network of filmmaking friends than a clear-cut artistic movement,
these filmmakers obviously share certain stylistic characteristics and thematic preferences.
In my paper I will try to show some of the stylistic innovations of the “Berlin School” by
analysing Valeska Grisebach’s film “Sehnsucht” (Longing, 2006). It tells the story of a love
triangle taking place in a small village in the countryside near Berlin. In my analysis of the film
I will especially try to shed some light on the questions of how the documentary-like film’s
look is achieved, how the camerawork and the editing is deployed and which relations to
other film-historical and contemporary auteur movements may be discernable.
Biography: Thomas Schick studied Theatre and Media Studies in Erlangen and Vienna. He
was a visiting lecturer at the University of Erlangen and teaches film history at the Film and
Television Academy (HFF) “Konrad Wolf” Potsdam-Babelsberg. His main field of research is
the emotional perception of film. He is currently working on a PhD on artefact emotions and
film perception. Together with Tobias Ebbrecht he has edited: Emotion – Empathie – Figur:
Spielformen der Filmwahrnehmung at Vistas Publishing Company, Berlin 2008.
13
_______________________________________________________________________________
COFFEE: 3.00-3.30pm – MYRA MCCULLOCH FOYER
_______________________________________________________________________________
KEYNOTE: 3.30-5.00pm – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Chaired by Ed Gallafent
Adrian Martin, Senior Research Fellow, Monash University, Australia – Entities and Energies
Abstract: Film analysis has often failed to bridge the divide, in its approaches and
methodologies, between mainstream narrative cinema and avant-garde film, between the
'representational elaborations' of the former and the 'primary processes' of the latter. Yet
avant-garde film, increasingly, takes narrative cinema as its subject and its material. One
such case is the Austrian experimentalist Peter Tschkerkassky, who as revisited the 1981
horror film The Entity three times, especially in two masterpieces, Outer Space and Dream
Work. Very few commentators on these films have actually gone back to Sidney J. Furie's
original. If they did, they might find a film that is intriguing on many levels - not the least of
which is its own deft employment of the 'primary processes' of shape, colour, rhythm and
sound. Moving back and forth between The Entity and its avant-garde remakes, I want in
particular to explore the question of 'energy' in contemporary film form and film criticism.
Biography: Since 1979, Dr. Adrian Martin has combined work as a professional writer and film
critic with a university career. He was film reviewer for The Age between 1995 and 2006. For
his numerous books, essays and public lectures he has won the Byron Kennedy Award
(Australian Film Institute) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and his PhD on film style
won the Mollie Holman Award. He is the author of four books and hundreds of essays on film,
art, television, literature, music, popular and avant-garde culture. His books include:
Phantasms: The Dreams and Desires at the Heart of our Popular Culture (1993); BFI Modern
Classics: Once Upon a Time in America (1998); Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World
Cinephilia (2003, co-edited with Jonathan Rosenbaum); Australian Screen Classics: The Mad
Max Movies (2003)
_______________________________________________________________________________
BREAK: 5.00-5.15pm – MYRA McCULLOCH FOYER
_______________________________________________________________________________
WORKSHOP SESSION B: 5.15-6.30pm – VARIOUS ROOMS
_______________________________________________________________________________
BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Adrian Martin - A workshop on The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1981) vs. Peter Tscherkassy’s
Dream Work (2002), Outer Space (1999) & Get Ready (1999)
Chaired by Lucy Fife
This workshop will develop some of the issues raised by today’s keynote address by exploring
the detailed realisation of The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1981) and Peter Tscherkassy’s 3 short
films. There will be particular focus on aspects of Tscherkassy’s films that weren’t addressed
in the plenary session.
_______________________________________________________________________________
14
STUDIO 2
Simone Knox – It’s not TV, it’s Sex and the City: The Movie: US quality television on the big
screen
A workshop on Sex and the City (Michael Patrick King, 2008)
Chaired by Jonathan Bignell
Abstract: The (industrial, production, technological, aesthetic, textual) exchanges between
film and television have always been important to both media, with a significant number of
cinematic remakes of and films based on television shows and vice versa. As Winston
Wheeler Dixon (2002: 363) points out, “in the past few years, presold remakes have come to
dominate the market in an unprecedented fashion”, and the late 1990s and early 2000s
have seen the release of a number of films that remake nostalgically remembered and
critically derided television shows from the 1960s and 1970s, including Charlie’s Angels
(2000), Starsky and Hutch (2004), and The Dukes of Hazzard (2005).
However, as the recent releases of The Simpsons Movie (2007) and Sex and the City:
The Movie (2008), the (second) The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), the forthcoming 24
(2009), and the persistent rumours of a Sopranos film indicate, cinema screens look set to
host a number of films based on contemporary and critically acclaimed US television series.
These series are so-called ‘quality television’, whose quality status, success and pleasures
are frequently understood (within both public and scholarly discourses) as hinged around
their cinematic look and feel.
Using Sex and the City: The Movie as a case study, this workshop aims to explore how
such films address and negotiate their televisual source texts; how quality discourses may
operate in these films; and what kind of viewing experiences they may offer. It will also seek
to consider why, given that the television shows’ much noted cinematic qualities should
perhaps make them well suited to the transfer to the big screen, at least some of these films
arguably fail as films, as The Simpsons Movie, Sex and the City: The Movie and The X-Files: I
Want to Believe suggest.
Biography: Dr Simone Knox is a Lecturer in Television in the Department of Film, Theatre &
Television at the University of Reading. Her research interests include the relationships
between British and American television drama, and the medium specificity of cinema and
television. She has published on The Simpsons, and British quality television drama, and is
currently researching the practices of dubbing and subtitling in both film and television.
_______________________________________________________________________________
BG78
Alan Lovell & Gianluca Sergi - Auteurs, art and entertainment
Chaired by James Walters
Abstract: We propose a workshop based on an analysis of a sequence(s) from The Departed.
Our first aim will be to identify the contributions that are evident in the sequence (direction,
script, cinematography, editing, sound, production design etc.). We’ll develop the discussion
by looking at explanations of what makes all the contributions cohere (if they do!). Some
notion like ‘director’s vision' is the answer that’s usually given. Interpretations of films are
normally made with this as the key idea.
We’ll argue that this isn’t a satisfactory answer, especially for a cinema like
Hollywood. We’ll suggest that interpretations of films would be more satisfactory if they were
based on a more diffuse and collective concept of authorship, one that isn’t tied to ideas of
the ‘individual’ and the ‘personal’. We’ve chosen a film directed by Martin Scorsese as his
work is usually discussed in terms of personal vision. And Scorsese talks about the films in
15
the same terms. And since his work is well known, participants in the workshop should be in a
position to discuss any claims we make.
Towards the end of the workshop, we’ll try to put our discussion into a broader
context by pointing to the connection between ‘personal vision’ and attempts to justify the
cinema as art. We’ll suggest there should be more interest in the cinema as entertainment.
Biography: Gianluca Sergi and Alan Lovell are co-authors of Filmmaking in Contemporary
Hollywood and (forthcoming) Cinema Entertainment. Gianluca teaches film at Nottingham
University. Alan is now retired, having taught film at Staffordshire University.
Note: Gianluca Sergi won’t be present for the workshop as he is attending another conference
this weekend.
_______________________________________________________________________________
BG147
John Gibbs – Balancing act: exploring the tone of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes
Anderson, 2004)
A workshop on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004)
Chaired by Lisa Purse
Abstract: The films written and directed by Wes Anderson offer audiences a different
relationship to character and action to that provided by many films of the 80s, 90s and the
early years of this century. Despite its ready artifice, the strong elements of pastiche, and the
presence of other features which often accompany the indiscriminate irony of fin de siècle
cinema, The Life Aquatic achieves a greater complexity of tone. Recent work on tone has
made a case for its central importance to film analysis, and recognised the considerable
demands it makes of the critic; The Life Aquatic provides a provoking case in point, and what
may be said about the film’s tone is vital to its interpretation and evaluation.
This workshop offers an opportunity to analyse the components which shape the tone of The
Life Aquatic, and the dynamic of their interrelationship; after a concise introduction outlining
the features of the film relevant to this enquiry, the session aims to provide a productive and
enjoyable discussion, anchored in the material detail of sequences.
Biography:
John Gibbs is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Reading. He is the author of Mise-enscène: Film Style and Interpretation (Wallflower, 2002) and the co-editor (with Douglas Pye)
of Close-Up, the annual publication devoted to the close analysis of film and television drama.
He was co-organiser of the Style & Meaning conference which took place at Reading in the
year 2000.
_______________________________________________________________________________
WINE RECEPTION: 6.30-7.30pm – STUDIO 1
Wine reception hosted by Wallflower Press, celebrating the Close-Up series edited by John
Gibbs and Douglas Pye
_______________________________________________________________________________
CONFERENCE DINNER: 7.30-9.30pm – BULMERSHE DINING HALL
_______________________________________________________________________________
SCREENING: 9.30 – 11.05pm
16
Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) 97 minutes – BG78
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tatou, Sophie Okonedo and Sergi Lopez (synopsis overpage)
A gripping drama that reveals the dangers of being an illegal immigrant in London. The film
follows the lives of Nigerian exile Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Turkish chambermaid Senay
(Audrey Tatou) who work at a west London hotel, in which all kinds of illegal activity goes on,
seemingly unnoticed by the outside world. After Okwe makes shocking discovery in one of the
hotel rooms, he is placed in an impossible dilemma. A deft and understated look at an
unseen world, the film manages to successfully combine a thriller narrative with political
intelligence and compassion.
The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and won a British
Independent Film Award for "Best Independent British Film" in 2003.
_______________________________________________________________________________
17
SUNDAY 7th SEPTEMBER
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION: 9.00 - 9.30am – MYRA McCULLOCH FOYER
_______________________________________________________________________________
PANEL SESSION C: 9.30 – 11.00am – VARIOUS ROOMS
_______________________________________________________________________________
FRAMEWORKS OF INTERPRETATION – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Chaired by Tom Brown
Warren Buckland - Stop making sense: Inland Empire and the limits of film analysis
Abstract: In his review of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), Michael Atkinson wrote that
“the surest way to find disappointment in Lynch’s Byzantine, exhaustive howl is to hunt for
codes and readings” (Sight and Sound, April 2007, p. 69). These comments point to the
limitations of film analysis in fixing (labelling, segmenting, classifying and, crucially, explaining)
the increasingly unpredictable films of David Lynch. From my scene-by-scene analysis of Lost
Highway (chapter 6 of Studying Contemporary American Film) and plot analysis of Mulholland
Dr. (Film Studies, chapter 2), I have found the task of analysing Lynch’s films to be fraught
with a sense of arbitrariness. In “Stop Making Sense: Inland Empire and the Limits of Film
Analysis,” I will confront the issue of whether film analysis as it is currently taught has ‘met its
match’ in explaining Lynch’s Inland Empire. I will consider the viability of replacing
explanation with a simple description of the way a film was made, using a modified poetics
approach to film analysis that draws upon filmmaking manuals (developed in chapter 2 of my
book Directed by Steven Spielberg). This approach acknowledges a film’s inherent ambiguity,
rather than seeing it as a puzzle to be unwound and over-rationalized.
References
Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis
(co-written with Thomas Elsaesser) (London: Arnold Publishers; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
Film Studies (second edition)
(London: Hodder Headline/Chicago: Contemporary-McGraw-Hill, 2003)
Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster
(Continuum, 2006).
Biography: Warren Buckland is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University.
He has two edited volumes coming out later in 2008: Puzzle Films (Blackwell) and Film
Theory & Contemporary Hollywood Movies (Routledge).
Andrew Klevan - What is (the usefulness of) philosophical film criticism?
Abstract: The paper will speak to the conference’s concern with contemporary film criticism by
endeavouring to highlight the characteristics and purposes of philosophical (film) criticism.
Stanley Cavell is the most noted practitioner of philosophical criticism, and he is the person
who has sought to conceptualise it most explicitly and thoroughly, but it may also be
associated with contemporary writers such as William Rothman, George Toles, Gilberto Perez,
and V.F. Perkins. The paper will draw attention to four facets. Firstly, there is the discovering,
and rediscovering, of a moment. One aspect of Cavell’s method is that it does not presume
there is a self-evident way to approach a film or assume what a revelatory instance in a film
might look like. One turns to the moment, initially perhaps with only the vaguest intuition of
18
its worth, and returns, repeatedly testing its components and one’s own experience of it.
Secondly, there is the very act of writing, especially description, which is a means of
revelation. Thirdly, there is the question of how the moment relates to the film as a film:
observing how the style of this film works is also a way of reflecting on how this film uses the
medium, how it reflects on the medium; indeed our modes of reflection, quite appropriately,
reflect each other. There is also, finally, and crucially, a critical dimension, or more accurately
an appreciative one to philosophical criticism. The paper will explore these matters in relation
to a short sequence from a contemporary film, and in general, it will seek to illuminate the
benefits of an unrestrained approach to film study, one that doesn’t presume in advance
where our interpretations should start, or how they should proceed.
Biography: Dr Andrew Klevan is University Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford University and a
Fellow of St. Anne’s College. His areas of interest are film interpretation, appreciation and
criticism and he is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Film
(2000) and Film Performance (2005).
Jakob Isak Nielsen – Visual style revisited: prospects for merging interpretative criticism and
cinematic poetics
Abstract: If cinematic poetics is a call for a lowering of the stakes and a return to the style of
the medium itself, then how is it different from the stylistically sensitive practical and
interpretive criticism that is generally and broadly described as British mise-en-scene criticism?
Rhetorically, both research perspectives have claimed to be a minority strand within
contemporary film studies and both have lamented the disrepute of stylistic analysis.
However, I wish to single out important differences regarding analytical procedures, the role
of interpretation and the contribution of style. This is made somewhat more difficult by the
fact that proponents of each perspective have set out to differentiate the two and in doing so
either misconstrued the difference or banalized the contribution of the other perspective.
Ultimately, I will not only argue that both perspectives have something to offer but also that
the they supplement each other so well that combining them represents a viable avenue of
future research.
Biography: Jakob Isak Nielsen: Born 1975. Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of
Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus. PhD thesis entitled Camera Movement
in Narrative Cinema - Towards a Taxonomy of Functions (2007). Teaches film analysis and
various graduate courses at the department, which combine some of his primary interests:
film style, film history, film theory and comedy. Founding editor of 16:9 - A Danish Online
Journal of Film Studies (www.16-9.dk). Co-author of the textbook Film i øjet (2005). Has
published articles and presented papers on visual style, stylistic history, comedy, short fiction
films and commercials.
_______________________________________________________________________________
TEXTURE IN FORM & PRACTICE – STUDIO 2
Chaired by John Gibbs
Edward Gallafent – Pen to paper? The materiality of writing in contemporary film
Abstract: What place does the written word have in contemporary film? We are familiar with
the ways in which narrative cinema has commonly used the imagery of the sending and
receiving of letters and of the acts of writing and reading them in both relatively mundane
and highly charged contexts. This paper will look for the shifts and the continuities between
usages in classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema, paying particular attention to cases
where the act of writing and subsequent reading is problematic (say, words written to an
unborn child, or by an unacknowledged lover, or where the act or reading is itself problematic).
The textual detail of the way in which words on paper are represented on screen, and
19
particularly the differences in plane – the horizontal plane of handwriting, the vertical one of
writing on a blackboard (or whiteboard) – will form part of this discussion.
Biography: Edward Gallafent is the author of books on Clint Eastwood, Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers, and Quentin Tarantino. He is Reader in Film Studies at the University of
Warwick, UK.
Kathrina Glitre - The world through jade-tinted glasses: Underneath, colour and neo-noir
Abstract: The first few shots of Underneath (Steven Soderbergh, 1995, US) are monochrome,
jade green. It is not immediately apparent why. In the context of a narrative film, the colour
seems excessive, even beyond meaning, because it does not conform to conventional codes
of realism, colour symbolism or psychological motivation. James Naremore suggests that the
film, like ‘a great many retro or “neo-noir” films use[s] colored light […] to evoke the
monochromatic tradition of high-contrast, black-and-white thrillers’ (1998: 192). Implicitly,
colour is assumed to achieve an equivalent effect to black-and-white chiaroscuro. But colour,
by definition, is not black-and-white. Colour – even monochrome colour – exceeds the binary
ambivalence of black-and-white: there is light, dark and green.
This paper explores the stylised use of colour in neo-noir, focusing in close detail on
Underneath as a typical example. It will identify some of the commonest conventions around
neo-noir colour (including neon) and consider how these stylistic conventions affect meaning.
In contrast to the shadowy depths created by chiaroscuro lighting in classic noir, neo-noir’s
use of colour flattens and fragments the world, expressing alienation and ‘the shattering of
unity’ (Kristeva 1980: 221).
Biography: I am a senior lecturer in Film Studies at the University of the West of England,
Bristol, and the author of Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934-65. This
paper draws on work for Neo-noir, a collection I am co-editing with my colleagues, Mark Bould
and Greg Tuck. I am currently completing an AHRC-funded project, Starring Cary Grant, for the
Close-Up series.
Cathy Greenhalgh – Focus and affect
Abstract: This paper explores the nature of differential use of lens focus; i.e. sharpness,
softness, and the movement between, as both storytelling tool and mimicry of human visual
perception. It outlines recent intervention in both film and high-definition camera fields
(lenses, filters, viewfinders) and how this can influence drama, presence, performance, facial
close-up, timing and choice of subject. Discoveries about the brain and perception in
neuroscience and neuropsychology have renewed film theoretical interest in cognition,
embodiment, emotion and affective dimensions of the film viewing experience (Marks, Naficy,
Sobchack, Niedich, Massumi, Delueze, Cubitt etc.).
I compare these trajectories with fieldwork from The Cameraimage International Festival of
the Art of Cinematography, held in Łodz, Poland in December; a unique event where
cinematographers share their art form, personal philosophies, cultural leanings and
influences. Interviews carried out with John Mathieson (Gladiator, 2000), Chris Doyle (Hero,
2002), Janusz Kaminski (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007), and Robby Muller (Dancer
in the Dark, 2000); describe the inventive solutions they’ve found in portraying the perception
of the human eye; through lens choice, point of view and differential use of focus in feature
film drama.
Cinematographers are masters (and mistresses) of effecting subtle technical (both digital and
optical) change in fields of perception, which in turn disturb and create affective experience
for the viewer. Emphasising these new practices by contemporary cinematographers can
benefit criticism by attunement to changing dimensions of film form and enables an
expanded interpretation of character and dramatic intent.
20
Biography: Cathy Greenhalgh is Principal Lecturer, Head of Film and Television at the London
College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She is Course Director of MA
Investigating Film Practice, and previously BA Film and Video for several years. She publishes
academic writing on cinematography and cinematographers, creative collaboration and film
aesthetics. Chapters are included in Making Pictures, A Century of European Cinematography
(Aurum / Abrams, 2003), Style and Meaning : Studies in the detailed analysis of film
(Manchester University Press, 2005), Going First Class? New approaches to privileged travel
and movement (Berghahn, 2007), Emotion and Interaction in the Teaching of Art and Design
(UAL, 2009). She is author of Cinematography (Wallflower Press, 2010 forthcoming). She is
co-founder of UAL's Film and Phenomena Creative Laboratory which promotes discussion and
collaborative film works with scientists. She originally trained at the National Film and
Television School and worked as a cinematographer for years in the British film industry. She
now directs films which incorporate choreography, documentary and animation elements,
using a combination of media for film / gallery spaces. Her last film, Aftermath (2006)
showed in many venues, gaining 1st prize at Strange Screen Festival in Greece.
_______________________________________________________________________________
FORMAL CHALLENGES TO THE MAINSTREAM – BG78
Chaired by Laura Hubner
Alejandra Rodríguez–Remedi - Ruiz and the critical mainstream
Abstract: This paper will attempt to stimulate discussion about why most mainstream critics
are yet to engage with Raúl Ruiz’s recent theoretical and audiovisual production. The negative
reviews and indifference meted out to Klimt (2006) and La Recta Provincia (2007)
disappointed a cross-cultural cinephile community which had been enthralled by Ruiz’s ludic
reflections - in the first two volumes of his Poetics of Cinema (1995 and 2007) - on the
filmmaker-as-bricoleur, the functions of the shot, germinal imagery, the dream function in film,
and so on. I will use textual analysis of the two aforementioned films - one a seemingly
prototypical Euro art-house biopic and the other a miniseries shot on digital video for Chilean
TV - to illustrate that this master of world cinema’s formal and conceptual radicalism
continues to pose stringent challenges to the critical mainstream in the Twenty-first Century.
Biography: I am a cultural researcher, educationalist and digital filmmaker. While studying for
a Licentiate and Master of Education at the University of Concepción, I contributed to several
teacher retraining, curricular design and educational management projects in the context of
Chile’s national education reform. My PhD – “The arts as means of cultural integration: A
Chilean case study” (Robert Gordon, 2007) – consisted of a comparative analysis based
mainly on in-depth interviews with exile and non-exile Chilean artists. I am currently
researching the poetic, (trans)formative potential of the audiovisual, with particular emphasis
on the work of filmmakers such as Ruiz, Marker and Tarkovsky.
Matthew Flanagan - Still lives & sculpted time: towards an aesthetic of slow in contemporary
world cinema.
Abstract: In a climate where mass-market American and international cinema is dominated by
the fast-paced and fragmentary intensified continuity style, a number of directors have
chosen to react with a highly idiosyncratic cinema of extreme minimalism, undramaticness
and contemplation. With specific examples, this paper will attempt to illustrate how the
distinct formal characteristics shared by the recent films of (amongst others) Béla Tarr, Abbas
Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhang-Ke & Gus Van Sant have collectively
formulated a unique transnational dynamic described here as an “aesthetic of slow”.
The aesthetic of slow is distinguished by a habitual utilisation of extended takes, dedramatised narrative structure and a heightened concentration on the everyday. As well as
21
demonstrating these inherent tropes, I intend to highlight prior modes of critical enquiry that
could aid a fruitful exploration of “slowness”: Bazinian long take theory, Andrei Tarkovsky’s
conception of “time sculpture”, and the “hyperrealist everyday” of Chantal Akerman’s work.
My paper intends not only to promote an understanding of this seemingly marginalised
development in the work of contemporary filmmakers, but also to provide a model that
illustrates the evolution of a world cinema as transcendent of spatio-temporal boundaries
through a flexible and methodical progression of form, structure and aesthetics.
Biography: I am a PhD student (aged 23) currently studying under the supervision of Dan
North and Steve Neale at Exeter. My AHRC-funded research project focuses on an attempt to
conceptualise and historicise the evolution of an Aesthetic of Slow in contemporary world
cinema (as outlined briefly above). I have been interested in an extremely broad range of
cinema for a number of years, and am presently writing an essay for the forthcoming BFI DVD
release of Bill Douglas’s Childhood Trilogy.
Hing Tsang - Jia Zhang Ke's minimalist aesthetics
Abstract: This paper considers the recent work of Jia Zhang Ke in particular The World (2004)
as an example of contemporary practice which is distinctly cinematic and informed by an
auteur sensibility. We have chosen to look at his work in the context of digital cinema as it
offers both similarities and divergences form what me might terms a 'DV aesthetic'.
While Jia Zhang Ke's previous films were shot on celluloid and were considered as part of a
non-mainstream underground practice, his more recent work has now further entered a
national/transnational market. This is reflected both in the thematics of his work - namely a
look at daily life within a global theme park in cosmopolitan Beijing - and also in the formal
stratagems. This work is shot in hi-definition DV, some of which is hand-held, while other
sections use a more static form of camerawork which is consonant with his earlier 35mil work.
The film also uses computer graphics of the type associated with mobile phones.
Therefore we consider some of the tensions in his work which are in turn reflective of greater
issues affecting filmmakers working in a transnational context who wish to both describe
local phenomena while employing formal tropes which distinguish their work form
mainstream television practice. In other words, his work raises questions about the notion of
cosmopolitanism and human agency in a fluid global network.
Biography: Hing Tsang is a filmmaker/theorist who has just completed a PhD dissertation
under the supervision of Brian Winston at the University of Lincoln. His research dealt
specifically with the semiotic theory of pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and its
application to documentary practice. His main research interests are Chinese film,
documentary cinema, experimental cinema and subjectivity.
_______________________________________________________________________________
COFFEE: 11.00 - 11.30am – MYRA McCULLOCH FOYER
_______________________________________________________________________________
KEYNOTE: 11.30 – 1.00pm – BOB KAYLEY STUDIO
Chaired by Andrew Klevan
Gilberto Perez, Head of Film Department, Sarah Lawrence College, USA – Looking at the
camera
Abstract: In this address I will examine different ways in which actors in a film can look at the
camera and different effects that can be achieved. I will begin with a study of Kurosawa's
Rashomon, in which divergent accounts of what happened in the forest are given before an
unseen court official whose place we take, so that the storytellers look directly at us in what
22
may called the narrator mode of looking at the camera. And in Rashomon there is also an
axial shot/ reverse shot when the bandit and the husband face each other in a duel and each
in turn faces us. I will consider other examples of the narrator mode (Kim Novak looking at
the camera at a key moment in Vertigo, Jean Seberg looking at the camera in Bonjour
Tristesse) and other examples of the axial shot/ reverse shot (Silence of the Lambs, Greed). I
will analyze in some detail the unusual use of glances into the camera in Tarkovsky's films
(Nostalghia, Solaris, Mirror,
Stalker), as well as the way Errol Morris in his documentaries (I will particularly consider Mr.
Death) has the people he interviews look straight at the camera for long stretches and so
turns them into storytellers in the narrator mode.
Biography: B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. M.A., Princeton University. Author of
The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium; film critic for The Yale Review and writer of
numerous articles for such journals as the London Review of Books, Raritan, The New York
Times, The Nation, The Hudson Review, Artforum, Cineaste, and Sight and Sound; recipient of
a Noble fellowship for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the Museum of Modern Art, a
Mellon Faculty fellowship at Harvard University, the Weiner Distinguished Professorship in the
Humanities at the University of Missouri, and Hewlett-Mellon and Bogert grants for released
time at Sarah Lawrence College.
_______________________________________________________________________________
LUNCH: 1.00 - 2.00pm – BULMERSHE DINING HALL
_______________________________________________________________________________
PANEL SESSION D: 2.00 - 3.30pm – VARIOUS ROOMS
_______________________________________________________________________________
USES OF TECHNOLOGY - BOB KAYLEY
Chaired by Lisa Purse
William Brown - Beowulf: the digital monster movie
Abstract: Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (2007) is the director’s second foray into computergenerated animation, following 2004’s Polar Express. Although other computer animations
have gained prominent releases recently, and while computer animation has also featured
strongly in films that retain a ‘flesh and blood’ cast, Beowulf deserves note for a number of
features, features that this paper will explore.
Firstly, the level of realism, in terms of the credibility of the animation, has reached a new
high in the film, particularly on the level of the facial registering of human emotions. Although
far from perfect, this does point to a future in which ‘synthespians’ will indeed be
indistinguishable from human actors.
Secondly, the spatial continuity of Beowulf’s diegesis, together with its thematic concern for
the ‘monstrous’ (it is alleged that Beowulf as much as Grendel is the monster in this film) ties
in with current thinking (Suzanne Hême de Lacotte, after Gilles Deleuze; Mary Ann Doane)
that digital technology renders cinema a ‘monstrator,’ based on montrage instead of montage,
a monstrous cinema in which everything is shown (monstrated).
Biography: William Brown is a Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews.
He has published on contemporary French, British and American cinema, and his interests
include digital technologies and their application to cinema in a variety of national contexts,
neuroscience and cinema, and stars (mainly Charlotte Rampling).
23
James Zborowski - Interactions between rotoscoping and popular cinema conventions in A
Scanner Darkly
Abstract: First, I would briefly highlight some of the overall effects of the rotoscoping process.
It has a potentially frustrating dimension to do with the presentation of human (and star)
faces. It establishes an interesting relationship between viewer and fictional world (and
possibly makes the story content less grindingly miserable), and raises some potentially
vexing questions not normally encountered in movies (do the characters see things in the
same way that we do when they look around?). It is also particularly appropriate to this
movie’s subject matter (perception-altering substances) and themes (which relate to issues of
perception and identity).
Second, I would describe some more local effects of the process through close textual
analysis of the first post-credits scene, where the Reeves character addresses an audience in
his ‘scramble suit.’ The familiar scenario of a public performance and role conflicting with
personal feeling and the familiar device of the revelatory close-up are given renewed force by
the film’s unusual style. An eloquent interplay is established between shots outside and
inside the character’s suit.
Biography: I am writing up my PhD thesis, titled ‘Between sympathy and detachment: aspects
of point of view in movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Max Ophuls.’ I
study at the University of Warwick, where I also completed my undergraduate and master’s
degrees in film (with aspects of literature and television).
Tom Hughes - Negotiating digital video with American cinema: Richard Linklater’s Tape
Abstract: Digital technologies have more often been heralded for what they could do than
what they have done. This paper will investigate the assimilation of digital video, a once-new
method for creating cinematic images, into contemporary film form. The topic will primarily
be engaged through close analysis of one text: Tape (Richard Linklater, 2001).
Scholars commonly accept that digital video was widely introduced by the Dogme95 collective.
In a subsequent moment (2001-2002) however, several major filmmakers – for example,
Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh – produced feature works with this cinematographic
technology. Because of its director figure, Tape belongs to this group. It can however be
understood as a hybrid due to its association with InDigEnt, one of several independent
‘digital’ production companies that engendered democratising discourses surrounding digital
video. Therefore the film is particularly instructive about the technology’s status at this time.
Using textual analysis of Tape, this paper will illuminate connotational styles attached to
digital video at this specific stage of its passage into cinema. I aim to exemplify how this type
of traditional film scholarship, used in context, can further understanding about the
institutionalisation of digital tools, whilst simultaneously encouraging greater appreciation for
Tape itself.
Biography: Tom Hughes is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Film and
Television Studies at the University of Warwick. The PhD’s working title is ‘Digital cinema
technologies, cinephilia and Richard Linklater’, and he is working on the project with
Professor Charlotte Brunsdon. He has also helped teach undergraduate film history modules
about the musical and Italian neo-realism.
24
_______________________________________________________________________________
QUESTIONS OF TONE & AFFECT - STUDIO 2
Chaired by Lucy Fife
James MacDowell - ‘There Will be Blood, and the Question of Tone’
Abstract: The ending of Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent There Will be Blood seemed to divide
critics. Some argued that its apparent ‘excesses’ appeared at odds with the preceding film,
while others claimed that the ‘dramatic outburst’ of the final scenes functioned as a perfect
finale to the narrative. Usually implicit in such debates was the difficult and contentious
question of tone.
My paper will offer a close analysis of the final scenes of the film, as well as place them in the
context of the movie as a whole. Rather than deal in generalities, I will try to identify the
specific ways in which this ending might be seen to disrupt the film’s tone in certain respects,
whilst also suggesting that this disruption has previously been partially prepared for.
Tone is an issue that has only recently begun to be granted the critical attention it deserves
by film scholars. Drawing on, amongst others, Douglas Pye’s work on tone and George
Wilson’s on point of view, I argue that There Will be Blood’s tone is the product of many
formal and narrational choices, and that we can only properly understand the film by looking
in detail at these particular choices.
Biography: I am a PhD student studying in the Film and Television department at the
University of Warwick. I have had two articles published on the online film journal Offscreen
(www.offscreen.com), and was the co-organiser of the conference 'Beginnings and Endings in
Films, Film, and Film Studies' (2008) at Warwick. I have spoken at the conference 'Cultural
Borrowings' at the University of Nottingham (2008), at 'Journeys Across Media: Authenticity?'
(Reading), and at 'Cine-Excess' (Brunel/ICA). I edit the film criticism website Alternate Takes
(www.alternatetakes.co.uk), which attempts to bridge the gap between 'high' academic and
'low' journalistic film criticism. My PhD dissertation is concerned with the 'happy ending' of
Hollywood cinema.
Iris Luppa – Questions of tone in Half Nelson
Abstract: Half Nelson depicts the friendship between Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a young
white history teacher and Drey (Shakeela Epps), a 13 year old black student, in an inner city
school in America. On an interpretive level, the film's material, the teacher-student
relationship, as well as issues surrounding gender, race and class, could easily be read as a
series of binary opposites: white/black, male/female, middle class/underclass, etc. These
narrative elements undoubtedly serve to highlight the obvious differences between Dan and
Drey, but how we see, read and understand them is not only an issue of signification
(Dan's 'whiteness' in the black ghetto as signifier of racial difference etc), but also of 'tone', a
critical concept which explores a film's implicit and interrelated modes of address and
spectatorial response (Pye 2006). This paper seeks to argue that a closer look at the film's
tone enables a more complex reading of individual moments in the film, as well as drawing
attention to the tension between the various discourses the film puts into play. This in turn
makes for a greater understanding of the film's key concerns with subjects bordering on
'taboo' in contemporary American society.
Biography: Iris Luppa is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at London South Bank University.
Publications include 'Weimar Cinema' in the Wallflower Close-Up series (2008), as well as
several articles on narration and point of view in Weimar cinema.
25
Laura Hubner - Caché: style, meaning, value and pleasure
Abstract: This paper focuses on the formal, stylistic and aesthetic components of Michael
Haneke's film Caché/Hidden (France, Austria, Germany, Italy, 2005), a transnational
production that might loosely be defined as art cinema thriller.
The paper seeks to investigate how far a close reading of a sequence can help to engage with
key questions concerning the evaluation of a film's worth and spectator/audience pleasure. It
will investigate how far distinctive stylistic elements of the film - the long static takes, the
absence of music - affect viewing and listening experiences, framing interpretations of
narrative meaning and tone.
The paper will contain a detailed reading of one sequence, contextualized within the film's
main narrative, positioned alongside broad thematic and political concerns (surveillance, guilt,
identity and ambiguity). The formal and stylistic aspects of the film will be examined in light of
diverse contemporaneous newspaper reviews, with the aim of looking at how limitations of
style are able to stimulate both interest and frustration.
Furthermore, the paper poses the question of how far issues of class, taste and identity
shape these kinds of reading.
Biography: Laura Hubner is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies within the Faculty of Arts at the
University of Winchester, UK. She has published widely on European cinema and gender,
including journal articles, book chapters and a monograph, The Films of Ingmar Bergman:
Illusions of Light and Darkness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
______________________________________________________________________________
STAGING AND AFFECT – BG78
Chaired by Jacob Leigh
Peter Matthews - Time, space, and eternity: Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence (2006)
Abstract: ‘Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing,’ wrote Simone Weil.
‘The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity – the most atrocious if it is the sign of an
unvarying perpetuity.’ Observing the uneventful daily prayers and rituals of ascetic
Carthusian monks in the French Alps, Philip Gröning’s 2006 documentary Into Great Silence
obliges the spectator to choose between these stark alternatives of full and empty time. The
‘secular’ viewer who demands traditional Deleuzian ‘movement images’ will experience
nothing but inane repetition and sheer, vacant duration. Those attentive to Gröning’s ‘time
images’ (embodied in long takes and the portrayal of micro-actions) will, however, pass
beyond boredom and mental drifting to something like a state of grace. Founded on a
dialectic of presence and absence, film is perhaps the privileged medium for revealing the
transcendental through the material and visible. Yet the largely political and cultural agenda
of film studies in the post-Bazin era has precluded discussion of this spiritual aptitude. Using
Into Great Silence as my test case, I propose a 20 minute paper that will (gesturally at least)
reopen debate about the relationship of cinema with theology. The exemplary figure in
Gröning’s epic work is the blind monk who nonetheless ‘sees’. The mystical encounter with
God cannot be represented directly – therefore, my analysis will also treat what might be
called ‘the metaphysics of offscreen space’.
Biography: Peter Matthews is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the London College of
Communication, University of the Arts London, and a regular contributor to Sight and Sound.
Steven Marchant - The Sequence Shot in Werckmeister Harmonies
Abstract: This paper proposes to examine the use of the sequence shot in Béla Tarr’s
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). What is curious and original in the Werckmeister shot is its
26
mix of the physical and the ‘metaphysical’: there is an emphasis on the blunt, mute
physicality of bodies involved in actions, but at the same time, and in a manner which recalls
such forebears as Antonioni and Tarkovsky, Tarr’s shot cannot be reduced to what happens in
it. It is a shot distinguished by the clarity with which it gives form to events, and yet this action
of ‘giving form’ carries with it a surplus which seems to hollow the event out from the inside,
giving rise to a unique alignment of occurrence and negation. These considerations of Tarr’s
staging of the shot in Werckmeister Harmonies open onto a more general theoretical
question: if the shot in modern cinema is conceived as an event, as something which
happens rather than a window onto something happening, then how should we respect this in
our descriptions and analyses? The account of the Werckmeister shot pursued here offers
itself as one answer to this question.
Biography: Steven Marchant teaches film history and film theory in the Media Arts
department at Royal Holloway University of London. His research explores the way films give
form to events, with special emphasis on 1940s Hollywood and modern European cinema.
His publications include: ‘How Laura Happens’, New Review of Film and Television Studies,
2003.
André Dias – The intrinsic autobiographical fixation in Bill Douglas’ trilogy
Abstract: We have to constantly question the reflex distinctions we make between forms,
styles, eras, tendencies – partly because [...] all cinema is in the present. – Adrian Martin
Even the most uninteresting dimension of film, like autobiography, can uncover formal
elements to sustain cinema’s expressive and reflexive autonomy, an enduring and most
contemporary struggle. In fact, the great difficulty for establishing an autobiographical quality
in film is precisely its extrinsic nature. How can a viewer, without having access to external
indications, draw autobiographical clues by means of some kind of vital link between author
and work? In Bill Douglas’ trilogy – My childhood (1972), My ain folk (1973) and My way
home (1978) – one can perhaps discover striking and structurally important evidence of
autobiography as unequivocally intrinsic to the cinematographic matter. One follows isolated
moments of a Scottish boy’s childhood in utter poverty. This isolation affects the dramaturgic
context, but also the characters’ appearances, in a process that much depends on the
recollection of childhood events, more likely to appear as unattached evocations of the socalled photographic memory. Certain elements or characters are shown fixated in turn, as if
frozen in a conjoint time that wasn’t recovered by the director’s memory. Such a powerful
differentiation stands for the characters’ un-sharing of a same location in memory: they only
coexist somewhat virtually. Unfamiliar elements can consequently be aggregated, producing
the much-desired narrative fiction. The lively beauty of Bill Douglas’ gesture resides
particularly in his film’s intrinsic autobiographical fixation, a major factor for avoiding an oversentimental sharing of his childhood memories, and thus similarly preventing a hasty
understanding of its “meaning”. Inspired by Daney’s close but not so fastidious readings, that
extracted immanent and heterogeneous ideas from films, and by Deleuze’s often overlooked
concerns with the creation of unknown problems by film’s expressive traits and evoked forces,
one wishes, being faithful to that primary and involuntary spectator’s shock, to simply present
how (this particular) cinema thinks.
Biography: André Dias is a first year PhD student at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa,
Portugal, researching ambiguity in modern cinema. Other research interests include film
editing, neo-formalist analysis, cinephilia, as well as contemporary philosophy, namely
biopolitics. Film programmer of Steina & Woody Vasulka video retrospective, New Berlin
School – A cinema of unease, Autopsy figures – Biopolitics in contemporary documentary,
and Angela Schanelec’s retrospective (forthcoming 2009) in Lisbon. Manages the cinema
and contemporary culture blog Ainda não começámos a pensar/We have yet to start thinking.
_______________________________________________________________________________
27
COFFEE: 3.30 – 4.00pm - MYRA McCULLOCH FOYER
_______________________________________________________________________________
PRACTITIONER Q & A: 4.00 - 5.30pm
Chaired by Lisa Purse
Stephen Frears – Q & A session with a focus on aesthetic choices in Dirty Pretty Things
Biography: Stephen Frears is the multi-award winning British director of films such as The
Queen (2006), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), The Hi-Lo Country
(1998), The Van (1996), The Grifters (1990), Dangerous Liasons (1988) and My Beautiful
Laundrette (1985), and television drama such as The Deal (2003), Fail Safe (2000), The
Snapper (1993) and many more. He recently acted as president of the Cannes Film Festival
jury (2007) and currently holds the ‘David Lean Chair in Fiction Direction’ at the National Film
and Television School.
_______________________________________________________________________________
CONFERENCE CLOSE: 5.30pm
28
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
John and Lisa would like to than
k the following people for their support:
Yoram Allon, Chris Bacon, Jonathan Bignell, Mark Broughton, Tom Brown, John Bull, Alison
Butler, Lucy Fife, Nancy Fulford, Stephen Frears, Ed Gallafent, Kathrina Glitre, Birgit
Grosskopf, Ceri Hovland, Laura Hubner, Tom Hughes, Tonia Kazakopoulou, Sam King, Andrew
Klevan, Simone Knox, Jacob Leigh, Iris Luppa, Adrian Martin, Sam Milsom, Theresa Murjas,
Gilberto Perez, Douglas Pye, James Rattee, Graham Saunders, Liz Silvester, Lib Taylor, Junior
Walker, James Walters, Elke Weissmann and the commercial services of University of
Reading.
The organizers would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of
Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading.
29